ceigered:

I hope I do not intrude, but what awesome degree are you studying for that you need so many languages ? My uni mate (whom I found out actually is an Esperantist of sorts too) is currently studying 4 languages, although I suspect that they aren't essential to any degree in particular other than his own personal goals.

I'm doing an MA in Bible and Ancient Near East at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Modern and Biblical Hebrew are required (thought my Bibilcal Hebrew level was pretty high before I came, so that's not a big problem), as it Akkadian and Aramaic. Need French and German for the PhD Program, like any PhD. I'll need a bit more Greek for that also. At this point the Hittite is just so I can get into more ancient texts. Would like to do a little Egyptian if possible.

I think I want to write a PhD about the Narrative Grammars in the ancient Near East from a structuralist perspective. I kinda want to do for ANE lit what Vladamir Propp did for Russian Fairy tales. In the end, I just wanna work on scripts for Bible movies.

I'm gonna say that I think Esperanto's closer to French.

I also think Esperanto is a lot closer to French than it is to Spanish.

ninjaaron_0:

ceigered:

I hope I do not intrude, but what awesome degree are you studying for that you need so many languages ? My uni mate (whom I found out actually is an Esperantist of sorts too) is currently studying 4 languages, although I suspect that they aren't essential to any degree in particular other than his own personal goals.

I'm doing an MA in Bible and Ancient Near East at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Modern and Biblical Hebrew are required (thought my Bibilcal Hebrew level was pretty high before I came, so that's not a big problem), as it Akkadian and Aramaic. Need French and German for the PhD Program, like any PhD. I'll need a bit more Greek for that also. At this point the Hittite is just so I can get into more ancient texts. Would like to do a little Egyptian if possible.

I think I want to write a PhD about the Narrative Grammars in the ancient Near East from a structuralist perspective. I kinda want to do for ANE lit what Vladamir Propp did for Russian Fairy tales. In the end, I just wanna work on scripts for Bible movies.

Thats an amazing amount of things you're doing! No doubt by the end you'll have access to an overwhelming amount of knowledge! I'll have to keep an eye out for you name in any future biblically orientated movies

Because you're aiming for a PhD I'd just recommend what others have said - just look around here and there in your spare time, don't worry about putting much dedication into it. EO's a fairly easy language to pick up, and most of my learning of EO has come from listening to people speak/ask/complain about/defend it in English

ceigered:
-i ~ -er

Spanish -ir, -er, -ar

ceigered:hom- (homme)

Spanish hombre

ceigered:traduk- (traduction)

Spanish traducción

ceigered:k- stem (similar to qu', in Spanish it's more pronounced/varying)

That's very much a pan-Romance thing.

ceigered:ne

Which does not mean "not" in French. The French word for "not" is pas, you just need ne in any negative sentence.

ceigered:
bon-

Originally came from Latin bonus and has the similar form bueno in Spanish.

ceigered:
ĉu ~ same function as est-ce que

Not really. If it had, you'd say in Esperanto *kien ĉu vi iras? analogously to French où est-ce que tu vas?

Note that the vocabulary may well be more similar to French, but concerning pronunciation, Esperanto is very much like Spanish which is why you may confuse the two languages easily.

darkweasel:Note that the vocabulary may well be more similar to French, but concerning pronunciation, Esperanto is very much like Spanish which is why you may confuse the two languages easily.

Ah, pronunciation wise I can see problems with Spanish. But that doesn't stop me from pronouncing my French like Esperanto

as for -i, well, French -er (é) sounds a lot more like i than Spanish -er, and there's no "br" in "homo" .

Please don't misunderstand my last post, I wasn't saying that those similarities we STRICTLY only between French and Esperanto and no other romance languages, they all share the same similarities to Esperanto of course. But French has these pronounced similarities that Spanish hasn't got quite as strongly outside general pronunciation.

darkweasel:

ceigered:ne

Which does not mean "not" in French. The French word for "not" is pas, you just need ne in any negative sentence.

I'm well aware of that, having learnt that 6 years ago. It may be just the negation marker (if it's even pronounced), but it has the same written form and position in a sentence as Esperanto, and historically is derived from "non" (non + pas = not + at all, back in the vulgar latin period).

darkweasel:

ceigered:ĉu ~ same function as est-ce que

Not really. If it had, you'd say in Esperanto *kien ĉu vi iras? analogously to French où est-ce que tu vas?

Sure, but isn't est-ce que as a question marker used more in French than say "acaso" is in Spanish? (I'm not sure, I had no idea acaso existed as a word until a couple of hours ago).

"Ĉu" is straight out of the Polish "czu". Same sound, same meaning, I believe.

I think the French/Spanish dichotomy is subjective. My Slovakian friend (whom I met through Esperanto), who had no knowledge of any romance language before Esperanto, found French a lot easier after. For me, Spanish is starting to make sense.

As for the original question, that depends: if you want your free time just to be free time, then I think you have enough on your plate already; if like me, you hate doing nothing, then learning Eo is easy, has tons of benefits and will complement your studies well.I'm sure everyone here would be happy to help you and would love to get to know you too.

darkweasel:

ceigered:ĉu ~ same function as est-ce que

Not really. If it had, you'd say in Esperanto *kien ĉu vi iras? analogously to French où est-ce que tu vas?

cxu is definitely slavic. See "Czy" in polish.

Still, there are some words that make me think that the latin part of the vocabulary have a significant influence from french: mangxi (well, mangiare in italian), friponi, vizagxo, pejzagxo, rugxa,...

The Yiddish word "צי" (pronounced like Esperanto "ci") is also very much like "ĉu", and is no doubt an example of a Slavic loanword to Yiddish. Zamenhof spoke Yiddish, so that would make at least two languages that he spoke, that used a similar word for yes or no questions.

Well, I'm probably putting Esperanto on the back burner at the moment, but that doesn't mean I won't be around sometimes, poking around.

Funny thing about this French/Spanish argument. After looking around at Esperanto for a couple of days, all my German started coming back out. Of course, Esperanto is much closer to the Romance languages than anything else, but there is just enough German in there to wake mine up. It's a decent mix, I'd say.

It's a bit interesting that, although Zamenhof was Jewish, there is absolutely nothing in Esperanto that reminds me of semitic languages.

There are some similarities with modern Hebrew in the freedom one has to build, as well as both having more or less the syntax of a creole language, but I attribute that more to the fact they both began to be spoken at around the same time, and there has been a lot of creative development necessary to move them in to full fledged languages. Also neither one originally had native speakers. Esperanto still, and Hebrew not long ago, were second languages to almost everyone using them.

The syntax of modern Hebrew is some kind of weird mix of English, German, Russian, and perhaps a bit from Spanish, along with a little Arabic and a some remains of Ancient times from Aramaic and real classical Hebrew (or Judite, as the Bible calls it's language), though already by 500 BCE there were strong influences from Persian (another 'European' language). The morphology, however, deviates very little from Classical Hebrew, so it's a bit deceiving. Those who study Modern Hebrew will pick up the Bible and they will recognize almost all of the forms and many of the words, but it doesn't make any sense to them. I've met Israelis who study the Bible with the Hebrew and and English Translation side by side! (I do that too sometimes, but for help with vocabulary rather than syntax.)

By the way, you should not gather from this post that Modern Hebrew is anywhere near as easy as Esperanto to learn. Once you master the morphology, the syntax is easy... but the morphology is quite large and very different than ours. I think it will still be more difficult for any native speaker of an Indo-European languages than it would be to learn another Indo-European language. On the other hand, if you already know Arabic, Hebrew is cake. I've also had Korean telling me that Hebrew is easier than English... I dunno.

ninjaaron_0:It's a bit interesting that, although Zamenhof was Jewish, there is absolutely nothing in Esperanto that reminds me of semitic languages.

Unsurprising, really. His knowledge of Hebrew was very poor, and he spoke no other languages in the Semitic family.

I expect his Hebrew was about as good as his English (=bad). He wasn't from a religious family, so he wouldn't have grown up spending a lot of time reading religious texts in Hebrew and Aramaic, as a religious Jew would have done at the time (and also today, to a great extent).

At least one paper has been written on the influence of Yiddish (which Zamenhof spoke well) on Esperanto. However, Yiddish is, of course, Germanic. I can't recall off-hand any Hebrew to Yiddish loan words that made it into Esperanto. Modern Hebrew was just barely getting started when Esperanto was released (1887), so I would estimate that modern Hebrew had exactly zero influence on how Zamenhof laid out Esperanto.